1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of displaying a document containing digitally formatted text, graphics, sounds, and movies ("web page") on a television screen without using horizontal scroll bars, while preserving the look and feel of the web page as originally contemplated by the web page designer.
2. Description of Related Art
Before the convergence of digitally formatted text and/or graphics information content such as web pages with consumer devices such as televisions, web pages were intended to be displayed on computer monitors. This allowed the web page designer some flexibility in determining the content of the web page since most computer monitors were capable of providing non-interlaced display resolutions that exceeded 640 by 480. Refresh rates exceed 60 hertz and are commonly supported as high as 85 hertz.
However, transmission sources in the television domain use an interlaced display format and are optimized to display full motion video. Each frame of the video is scanned out as two fields that are separated temporally and offset spatially in the vertical direction. Under the NTSC video display standard, video signals have an interlaced refresh rate of about 60 hertz and provide 525 horizontal lines by about 320 vertical lines of resolution for each field. This enables a television screen to display television signals carrying full motion video with sufficient clarity and without noticeable flicker. Other television standards such as SECAM and
are also used to display video, text, and/or graphics, but are not discussed here to avoid over-complicating the discussion of the problems with the related art.
Text and/or graphics may also be displayed either without a background or as overlays over the full motion video on the background. However, displaying text and/or graphics on a television display screen results in poor image quality because the color television screen's display resolution and color optimization are ill-suited for displaying text and/or graphics. In addition, web page text may be presented using small font sizes which results in poor readability of the text on the television display screen. Such small font sizes includes font sizes less than 12 points or 10 characters per inch.
Another not-so-subtle problem includes scaling the text and graphics to fit within the display resolution of the television screen. Display of web pages having web page content can be crudely forced to "fit" within a window since many computer systems today use a GUI ("Graphical User Interface") that allows windows of varying size to be displayed. Text and/or graphics intended for computer monitor display are generally bit-mapped objects which have a defined resolution. The resolution of an object defines for the object a relative size and a relative clarity. Thus, with respect to clarity there is an incentive to use an object having a higher resolution than that of an object having a lower resolution.
However, since the resolution of the object also defines the relative size of the object, an object having a resolution that is greater than the resolution of a display results in an oversized object. This is sometimes referred to as the oversize problem. This problem was not often encountered in the computer domain since most monitors had display resolutions that either equalled or exceed the resolutions of objects commonly displayed on such monitors such as web pages displaying bit-mapped text and images.
Consequently, designers of web pages, or any other type of presentation format that displayed bit-mapped text and images, had some leeway in choosing objects that were of higher resolution.
However, the display of bit-mapped text and/or graphics is not well-suited with consumer devices such as televisions. For example, displaying a web page having text and/or images does not render well on a television display screen because the television display screen does not provide the same level of resolution as a computer monitor and is color optimized to display full motion color video. Thus, not only does a television display screen offer poor image quality but it is prone to an oversize problem because it offers lower resolution than the resolution of images and text found in web pages. The oversize problem usually results in only a portion of the web page being displayed.
One known solution to the oversize problem is to reduce images having sizes that are causing the problem, while maintaining the original size of other images within a web page so that the web page fits within the horizontal margins of the television display screen. However, such an approach changes the overall proportion of the web page and thus, does not preserve the original look and feel of the web page. Moreover, by not scaling all of the images in the web page may result in foreground images mis-aligning with other adjacent foreground images or with a background image.
Another known solution under the NTSC standard is to provide an overscan resolution, which resolution provides 640 by 480 lines of resolution but results in some of the video being lost beyond the edges of the screen. To access the entire display horizontal and vertical scroll bars may be employed to permit a viewer to scroll the screen to access portions of the display not shown. However, this approach does not retain the original look and feel of the web page since it results in only a portion of the web page being shown on the screen at a given time.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide a method of displaying a web page within a television display screen that attempts to retain the original look and feel of the web page while allowing the web page to fit within a selected horizontal width without the use of horizontal scroll bars.